Doodling, Oh Yes, There Has Been Doodling

I'm pale, pasty, depressed and cold...very, VERY cold. It has been a doozy of a winter and doodling may be the only thing that has keep me from sighing 'Goodbye Cruel World' and leaping from my desk.

I've been trying some new (to me) tangles rather than using the 'Go To' stable of favorites that I always use. I am also experimenting with drawing them larger so that I can use some of the elements as Gemz. I'm thinking that that is what I will do with the one below. I think the 'pearls' will look groovy in jewel tones!

My company is having it's annual art show right now and I submitted a few pieces. The curator of the show is always trying to get me to make 'bigger' pieces. He has a preference for large canvases (think bigger than a person). I keep telling him that this kind of detailed stuff is not conducive to extraordinarily big pieces. I wanted to accommodate him but wondered how to accomplish such a huge endeavor. Then I thought about how my family often has a jigsaw puzzle set up on a table somewhere during the winter and they just pick away at it when they have a minute rather than trying to do it all in one sitting. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!

So I put a large 24" by 38" piece of rice paper on my kitchen table, and I doodled a little on it whenever the mood struck me. The results?  Well, good and bad.

Bad:

• It just looks disjointed to others who don't know the story behind it. 
• It may also be used as Exhibit A in any legal case in which I have plead 'Insanity'.
• The vegetation in the rice paper literally chews up expensive pens and leaves them broken husks.
• When hung in the back hallway in the dark, you can't really see the details.

Good: 

• It turned out to be a wonderful journal piece of my year!

There are random patterns where I just doodled for the stress relief and there are little hints to what was going on in my lift during the year:

• Koi from my trip to Olbrich Gardens
• A salamander and a full moon, from the experience of working with DNR to help endangered salamanders across the highway in the middle of the night. 
• Ben and Cooper's paw prints
• A turtle and shells from my trip to Maine

Here are some other pieces that I contributed-most of them have been shown on here before:

I liked this little bird holder I found at Michael's Craft Store.

So yep! There has been doodling. It's really been my saving grace during these grey frigid months!